Flannery O'Connor

"I am not one to limit the power of the pen if it is wielded right."

"The role of the fiction writer is not to instruct or to moralize."

"I often think the world is turned upside down and all the perceptive people are on the bottom."

"Everywhere I go, I'm asked about the novel. This means the novel must still be in a bad way."

"The writer's job is to grapple with the real world with all its grotesqueness."

"Experience is the great teacher, and fiction allows us to experience what we might never experience in life."

"You don't write the same because you are not the same."

"A story that is any good must convey something calmly that has previously only been felt acutely."

"The Christian doesn't have to be neurotic but he is asked to take up his cross."

"I imagine the resurrection of the body to be important if we are right now eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Christ."

"The South was a violent semi-frontier sort of place and it retained some qualities of that even up to now."

"My mother is a Wyandotte and my father was part German and part Scotch-Irish."

"You learn to write by writing and you learn what to write about by living."

"I am not a visionary."

"The reason to write is that you understand something more completely by writing about it."

"You can't create anything much worse than what you see on television."

"There is a certain grain of stupidity required to write."

"The eye of the reader is the one that matters most."

"To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that destroys vision."

"I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say."

"The woods are full of regional writers, and it is the great horror of every one of them that he will create a work of art."

"My subject in fiction is the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it."

"You know that no one thing is going to change a writer's work."

"Fiction writing is something that has to be sustained, that can't be done in a kind of spurt."

"If other ages felt less, they saw more."

"A kind of Christianity without Christ is getting these days to be the favorite of quite a few."

"I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted."

"The old lady didn't want to look at the real world but somehow it insisted itself upon her."

"Writing is the hardest test of honesty."

"The novelist is looking for the pattern of grace in the world and for him the most obvious pattern is evil."